Bail Jumper (1989)

April 13, 1990

Review/Film;
Things That Can Happen When People Fall in Love

By CARYN JAMES

Published: April 13, 1990

LEAD: Love that blooms in Murky Springs, Mo., may be no more predictable than it is anywhere else, but it is positively more apocalyptic. Elaine, a petty thief, is the daughter of country-and-western singers who emigrated from central Europe, and Joe is a gun-carrying young man who seems descended from James Dean.

Love that blooms in Murky Springs, Mo., may be no more predictable than it is anywhere else, but it is positively more apocalyptic. Elaine, a petty thief, is the daughter of country-and-western singers who emigrated from central Europe, and Joe is a gun-carrying young man who seems descended from James Dean. That's not the strange part. When these two get together, the stars are so jolted out of alignment that the results include tornadoes, a tidal wave, a solar eclipse that lasts 23 hours and a meteor that smashes through a car's windshield, allowing easy access to a swarm of locusts.

But ''Bail Jumper,'' a small sardonic first feature directed and co-written by Christian Faber, assumes an easygoing attitude toward these problems. Like his characters, Mr. Faber allows the omens to accumulate while he lavishes attention on more idiosyncratic mishaps.

Lying in bed, Joe shoots a spider on the ceiling, and gets a face full of plaster. Elaine's twin sister shows up briefly to bury their cat along with a gun they used in a previous holdup. Elaine shoplifts some eight-track tapes of Jim Nabors and Tom Jones. And when she decides to jump bail, she and Joe drive headlong into a string of natural catastrophes that follows them East, where they find themselves the sole inhabitants of Staten Island.

Eszter Balint, who was the Hungarian cousin in Jim Jarmusch's ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' makes Elaine's bizarre behavior seem normal and gives the film much of its skewed charm. But it is more than her presence that brings Mr. Jarmusch's film to mind. With its rambling narrative and cockeyed characters who make more sense than the mainstream Americans around them, ''Bail Jumper'' owes so much to the Jarmusch style that it can't help but seem derivative.

That wouldn't matter if each scene were as sharply wrought as Mr. Jarmusch's. But ''Bail Jumper,'' which opens today at the Angelika Film Center, tends toward flab. Scenes and running jokes go on too long, giving the film a lethargic tone, as it flags and picks up countless times.

The conspicuously unmatched color in the stock scenes of tornadoes and tidal waves calls attention to the film's low budget, though it is possible that a director as clever as Mr. Faber means to comment on disaster films. If ''Bail Jumper'' were more cogent, that question wouldn't arise.

The film works best for an audience willing to wait for its quirky moments and meanwhile to enjoy the deft performances - of Miss Balint, of B. J. Spalding as Joe, and of Joie Lee as a psychically gifted woman they meet on the road - and to appreciate the kind of imagination that finds the apocalypse to be a welcome relief from Middle America.

Natural Disasters

BAIL JUMPER, directed by Christian Faber; written by Mr. Faber and Josephine Wallace; director of photography, Tomasz Magierski; edited by James Bruce; music by Richard Robbins; production designer, Lynn Ruth Appel; produced by Ms. Wallace; released by Angelika Films. At Angelika Film Center, Houston and Mercer Streets. Running time: 96 minutes. This film has no rating.